


Leaving The Gardens Tidy

by watsonmycompass



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - World War I, Description of Injuries, F/M, Nursing, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-09
Updated: 2014-10-09
Packaged: 2018-02-20 13:10:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2430044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watsonmycompass/pseuds/watsonmycompass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s somebody’s hands brushing gently over his forehead. She’s humming, whoever she is, with quiet, comforting intensity, like they’re the only two people in the world. Hell, for all he knows they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leaving The Gardens Tidy

At first, Bellamy sees the sky.

It’s this clear light blue, the colour of spring. In winter that same sky is grey and white and cold, giving way quickly to the dark in the evenings—the trenches are dotted with men, on watch or escaping the rats and the heady smell of dirt and death, huddled stiffly against the walls with the glow of embers between their teeth.

It’s funny, he thinks, how everyone said it would be over by Christmas. Over and over, like a nervous prayer. Especially funny how when the snow melted and turned to stagnant water, rancid with flesh and at least ankle deep, they were  _still there;_  their feet rotting away in their boots.

 

He thinks of Octavia. He doesn’t want to die here. He wants to see his sister again, he needs to see that she’s safe, like he always has. He’s being steadily jolted, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Is he at sea? No, it’s just the tread of the stretcher bearer. His head lolls to the side and suddenly he’s not looking at the sky anymore. Someone is moaning a name over and over, and a bloody, motionless sack of a body is pressed into the clay of the field’s floor, trapped under a mess of red brown metal and mud.

He’s so scared, and it aches. He can’t tell where the pain stops and his chest begins. There’s this awful, broken sound of moaning…  _make it stop_ , he tells nobody, and only then does he realize that the noises are coming from his own mouth—wet and full of blood from his bitten tongue. He screams for a medic but only hands come, holding him firmly in place as he fights, blind. When air finally comes gasping back into his lungs, anger overcomes fear for a few moments; absolute fucking fury and desperation because Octavia. He needs to see Octavia. He’s not going to go so easy, have his sins wiped away and his name put on some stupid monument. He’s going to get better, and run away from this bloody war the first chance he gets, and then he’s going to see Octavia. He’s going to see Octavia. 

The hands grip his shoulders and ankles, dragging him quickly off the stretcher and onto something else; voices murmuring above him, mingling with screams that alternate between sounding distant and close at hand. He’s raving, he knows, thrashing half blind with his eyes rolling back into his head like a lamed horse, the taste of blood in his mouth and nostrils metallic, hot and cold at the same time. But somebody takes his hands. ‘Of course you’ll see her. Just keep still for me.’ Then to one of the people above him who he can’t see. ‘You—wait. You need to get the Lieutenant.’ Then, murmuring again, warm and quiet in his ear, a distraction from the probing fingers at his collar bone. ‘Of course you will. Of course you will.’

They take him away again, and he has the vivid impression of biting down on his belt, tremors rocking through him with near unbearable pain. There’s somebody’s hands brushing gently over his forehead. She’s humming, whoever she is, with quiet, comforting intensity, like they’re the only two people in the world. Hell, for all he knows they are. He thinks of rocking Octavia to sleep in their sparse, comfortless room when they were both children, too embarrassed at his breaking, scratchy voice to sing. He’s so tired, and someone’s hands are holding his tightly in both of theirs, restraining them with gentle violence to stop the worst of the tremblings that are breaking through his body again like waves hitting the shore. He sleeps. Maybe he’ll be too tired to dream. He keeps thinking the same thing over and over again, afraid of the dark spots at the edge of his vision, almost as much as he welcomes rest.  _Of course you will. Of course you will._

_-_

He’s been at Field Hospital 59B for a week when he opens his eyes and sees Clarke Griffin standing there, at the end of his bed looking through his charts. At first he thinks he’s hallucinating, or dead. They both seem equally likely at this point. Clarke Griffin was always at the edge of the socialite crowd, the one Octavia had been so mad about back home—she’d walked out with a young, charming kind of boy a couple of times but he hadn’t been able to keep his hands to himself and Bellamy had all but broken his jaw—Octavia might not have been rich like them, or have parents and grandparents whose lines probably led back to the Almighty himself, but she had Bellamy. Her jailbird big brother, always trying to protect her.

Clarke—Nurse Griffin, he realizes, mouth hanging open in shock—looks up and notices he’s awake, gives him a genuine smile. She looks exhausted, he realizes, sick even, with pallid skin and a few tendrils of coarse, light blonde hair escaping from the neat, regulation bun and white cloth hairpiece, so far from the pretty tidy girl who stirred up some scandal in London before the war by declaring her intention to train as a nurse. Work for someone of her class wasn’t seen as quite respectable then, though it’s become quite fashionable since. Her friends back home are knitting socks and arranging charity galas. He wonders what the hell she did to end up here.

She doesn’t recognize him, he thinks as he meets her eyes, and for a moment he’s disappointed. Not that she  _should_  recognize him, when they never even met, only saw each other from a distance. Besides, everyone knows her—even if she wasn’t as boisterous as the other girls, never actively seeking popularity, it came to her all the same. She wrote Octavia a letter of recommendation when she wanted to find work as a secretary, grinned at her from under the hand she’d been using to shade her eyes from the sunlight streaming in through the windows, in the Reading Room at the British Museum.

'This'll make them sit up, the dusty old prigs.' she'd said with mischief in her eyes, and made Octavia laugh as Bellamy watched, waiting in the doorway to take his sister home. Her hair had shone that afternoon, the yellowing sun of late afternoon revealing the dust moats that swirled, unseen, in the air around her. She'd waved Octavia's thanks away and for a moment he'd had to remind himself that all the things that made her different from the rest of her kind were just skin-deep. Her nursing. The dress in white and green for the suffragette cause that fully cleared her ankles… she might not have been cruel or haughty, like the rest of them, but she'd never known hardship. Her parents had given her everything he'd never been able to give Octavia—it was easy but dangerous to forget, watching her among the books he'd thought she might actually try to read instead of decorate with, with the laughter in her eyes, and the sun on her skin, that she was practically royalty.

He hadn’t wanted to touch anything, he remembers, afraid of spoiling it—all that history, all that finery. Octavia deserves it, all of it, and he’d knock down anyone who even thought otherwise, but he, Bellamy, doesn’t. He’s too low. The kid he was then or the man he is now, both are broken. He couldn’t save his mother and he still can’t give his sister everything she deserves. He couldn’t give her anything at all from prison.

(He still remembers Shumway’s voice, the look on his face as he’d given Bellamy the revolver. You do something for me, constable. And I’ll do something for you.’)

He swallows, and pain draws him back to the present. ‘It’s all right.’ Clarke says, and goes to pull off his shirt so she can change his dressing. ‘Do you mind…?’

'No.' he says. He can feel his face heating up and he has to avoid her eyes, which is ridiculous. He's a grown man, and she must do this tens of times a day, for scores of soldiers. He notices, at the worst possible moment, that he's clean and wearing regulation clothes. Which means she must have washed him while he was out.  _Jesus_.

She must sense his discomfort, because she concentrates on the task at hand, only sparing him a smile when he finally looks up at her, fingers gripping the thick woolen blanket reflexively against his will.

'What happened?' he asks her, but it comes out as a croak. He can't tell exactly how badly he's injured, but he knows it's not good, can feel it in the ache of his chest and the fragile pull of his lungs and the steady throbbing somewhere near his knees. 'Am I… in one piece?'

'You're lucky.' says Clarke, and it's not so much happiness he feels as crushing relief. He breathes out, one of Clarke's hands resting on the bare skin of his chest as she peels away the soiled dressing with her other. He blinks tears from his eyes, the relief fastened too tightly under his ribs to care, hope on his heart like a crustacean. The dressing hurts, but he misses the steadying warmth of her hand when it's gone—maybe he's imagining it, but he thinks her fingers linger there for a moment before she rocks back on to her ankles and smiles at him again, her work done and free to give Bellamy her full attention. 'You took some shrapnel, by the looks of it. The surgeon had to dig it out of your chest. Your leg's fractured in a few places, but not broken. Apart from that, it's just cuts and scrapes. Nothing permanent.' She touches his forehead, examining his bruised eye and checking for fever.

Her smile is warm and real and somehow radiant, even with her unhealthy pallor and the bruise purple hollows underneath her eyes.

He huffs out a laugh, exhilarated, and thinks back to that day that feels like so many years ago, when she stood with his sister among the old tomes and rich colours of the Reading Room, drenched in the sun.

'Your hair's coming down, princess.' he tells her, for whatever reason, and she chuckles dryly at him, struggling to tuck the unruly stands back into place. 'I don't believe that's an accurate nickname for someone who empties bedpans for a living, Private Blake.'

'Bellamy.' he tells her, and his smile is warm and real too.

'Clarke.' she says back, which he's pretty sure breaks every regulation in the book and then some. There's a disturbance down the ward and someone shouts out for help. She stands sharply, obviously meaning to go, but stops at the last second. 'Bellamy,' she says, deep in thought. 'Bellamy Blake. You don't have a sister, do you?'

He stops laughing and stares at her, the humour startled out of him.

'Octavia. You kept saying… I knew an Octavia Blake, before the war. She had an older brother.'

He nods, unable to say anything else. He feels the wheezing of his treacherous lungs, something overwhelming and vital pounding in his head. He thinks that he might fall off the knife’s edge, die, throw up, desert, run away back to that comfortless room on the strength of all this nervous energy and fight off all its demons until he finds her.

'Small world.' she says thoughtfully, and leaves him. He watches her walk away.

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘MCMXIV’ (‘1914’) Not entirely sure how I feel about this. I wrote it a while back and hopefully there's a sequel on the way, but idk. Hope you enjoyed.


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